Weapons testing and/or training uses various sensors to take measurements at a weapons range. (As used herein, the term “range” refers to an area where weapons are tested.) The system under test communicates and cooperates with various range assets in the form of tracking, monitoring, simulation, and control system(s). The testing and training events involve real weapons, se real measurements are gathered in real-time. A particular sensor system may include half a dozen to several hundred individual component sensors, and the sensor systems are themselves inherently distributed, typically over a large geographic area. As a result, military ranges are generally large-scale, distributed, real-time and embedded (DRE) systems.
These weapon systems and range assets are often designed, developed, and manufactured by different contractors, for different military commands, even across different branches of the military. The Department of Defense (DoD) has developed a test architecture known as Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA) which enables these disparate systems to interoperate. TENA defines a common language, establishes a communication mechanism, and provides context that enables divergent systems to communicate via a middleware framework. (See “TENA: The Test and Training Enabling Architecture Reference Document,” available from the TENA Software Development Activity at www.tena-sda.org).
The interoperability provided by TENA allows the DoD to leverage its field infrastructure investments across the DoD, to foster reuse of range assets, and to reduce the cost of future range assets. There is an ever increasing need to miniaturize on-system instrumentation and provide standardized real-time control, status, and/or data links between field instrumentation suites, tactical systems, and networked computers during test events. To complicate matters further, these instrumentation suites are typically not collocated and may be exposed to the harsh environments at an open air test range, in a vehicle, or on an aircraft. TENA provides this functional capability but limiting factors such as software execution efficiency, command/response time, and computer platform requirements for Size Weight and Power (SWaP) can impose use case constraints in closed-loop situations, and with other test activities where command/response times are critical.